The growth of the Internet over the past few years has been tremendous—both in terms of the number of people accessing information through the Internet and in terms of the amount and nature of information available through the Internet. Information services now available on the Internet include driving directions between two addresses, nearly up-to-the-minute stock quotes, and directories of addresses and telephone numbers. In addition, the Internet has been a platform for offering a number of services including, for example, purchasing goods and services, making reservations at restaurants and hotels, purchasing airline tickets, and other services pertaining to vacations and travel generally.
The accessibility of such information and services to the typical user is greatly enhanced by organization of such information and user interface tools into multimedia documents known generally as Web pages. Such multimedia documents can include images, text, audio, motion video, and active computer instructions (e.g., Java™ scripts) to effectively and efficiently communicate information to the user and to provide intuitive and self-explanatory user interface mechanisms. In addition, such multimedia documents can refer to other multimedia documents to provide a hierarchical information structure to suit the specific informational needs of individual users. These tools, while conventional, provide a highly effective information browsing experience for the user.
The user's experience is frequently described as browsing or surfing since the user picks and chooses her way through the apparent sea of information to find her own path to her own information of interest. The descriptive terms of browsing and surfing seem particularly apt as broadband Internet access increases in popularity making the Internet user's experience a truly multimedia one.
If the general Internet is an apparent sea of information, accessing the Internet through a web-capable wireless telephone seems like a trickle of information by comparison. While many Internet-capable computer systems have screen resolutions of 1024 by 768 pixels or greater, 105-key keyboards, a pointing device such as a mouse or trackball, and sound capability; most Internet-capable wireless telephones are limited to just a few lines of just a few characters of alphanumeric text and input keypads of little more than a dozen keys. In addition, communications bandwidth of Internet-capable wireless telephones is also severely limited relative to the typical Internet-capable computer. If surfing in a sea aptly describes the typical user's experience through an Internet-capable computer, a typical user's experience in accessing information in an Internet-capable wireless telephone can sometimes feel like building a model ship in a bottle.
This limited browsing experience through mobile devices such as wireless telephones is exacerbated by the fact that the user is typically preoccupied with other activities while using the mobile device to browse information. Mobile devices derive their value primarily from their mobility and are therefore likely to be used when the user is preoccupied with other activities. Mobile devices are therefore frequently used with only one hand and in manners in which the user's physical control of the mobile device is otherwise compromised. As a result, mobile devices are not particularly well suited for handling large amounts of information and the users interest is typically highly localized to a small amount of very specific information.
Of course, the great advantage of Internet access through a wireless telephone is the ability to access information of the apparent sea of information of the Internet while out and about—such as while commuting or while traveling away from home or while out shopping, for example. However, a better way to access information through an Internet-capable wireless telephone is highly desirable.